I went to the Play store to search for a text to speech app. To my surprise, it said I already had one: Google Text To Speech, and that it was probably already on. Sure enough, in settings, there it was. But not a word - zero - about how to use it, or point it to any arbitrary text, and have it start reading.
I found this post which lauded what this app can do - but using it, controlling it? No joy. Then I read in this article about Read Aloud, a Chrome extension. Apparently, Google TTS, despite the name, is NOT used to read text?! I guess it doesn't matter if there is no way to control it. So I got Read Aloud, after checking that it works on mobile and not just desktop.
Supposedly, you can control it from an icon. But after clicking the button, did I see an icon? No, of course not. People, what am I missing here? I just want to use my phone to read arbitrary text. How do I make that happen? Thank.